> The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) of the United States demonstrated pretty well what can happen if you shirk safety and that was just manufacturing pesticides.

> There's always that one meteorite.

But we just ignore the meteorite. Nobody has made any attempt to stop either of us being hit by a meteorite. We just let it fall where it may.

We've had safety standards shirked, we've had multiple disasters and the worst case scenario so far appears to be order-of-magnitude equal to a normal year of current practice using fossil fuels. It seems to be well within our tolerance for risk.

The issue here is that progress on one of the most promising sources of energy we have has been blocked and it is hard to find someone who can articulate a reason why, let alone a good reason. Between Germany and Japan we've had countries that appear to be more willing to risk deindustrialisation than just keep on with a perfectly acceptable nuclear status quo. It is madness. It is akin to trying to move civilisation underground to avoid the inevitable meteor strike that is going to wipe out humanity - we can't afford that expensive a risk mitigation and it doesn't seem clear that it would even help.

'We' is doing a great deal of heavy lifting for you there.

South Korea has fast build times, China has 100 reactors planned with 10(?) (IIRC) currently under construction, a large MW scale pilot SMR completed and tested for a year, ground broken for a low GW 2nd gen salt reactor based on the pilot, and plans for a large high GW third gen version waiting on the 2nd gen being completed and bedded in for any modifications to plan.

The economics vary by country and demand, here in Australia there's no economically feasible near term path for nuclear power gen. for a number of good reasons, not the least being the short term return from putting any available money into renewables and batteries - but this is a particular economic constraint setup that differs to other countries.

> Deaths are rare in the US, a bit more common elsewhere, that's a fact.

> I can't say that's an argument for relaxing standards or being less safety conscious in reactor design, building codes, or medical and industrial procedures.

It's prima facie evidence you're picking the wrong trade-off between safety and productivity. Because of the nature of diminishing returns, the optimal point in a cost-benefit trade-off usually results in both non-negligible cost and non-negligible benefit. When your safety regs are so strong as to have driven risk to ~zero, but where the compliance cost of the regs are reflected in every aspect of the industry, there ought to be a presumption of over regulation that would need to be rebutted quantitatively. It's irresponsible to set degree of regulation without estimating the costs of compliance.

With the caveat that I'm not picking any trade-off other than the time cost involved in looking up a few incomplete answers to forum questions that catch my interest;

it's extremely difficult to evaluate industry (broad industry, not just nuclear) safety value on the basis of deaths that have occurred without a solid understanding of the deaths and other costs that can occur should standards be relaxed.

The analysis on various Los Alamos et al. National Laboratory incidents during the early atomic days reveals that things easily could have been much worse, rather than three dead greater numbers could have been killed and expensive facilities rendered unusable. Carrying live but "safe" nuclear weapons about came razor close to accidental detonation on US soil near civilian population centres on a few occassions - these make studies for whether safety procedures were justified in time and expense or perhaps barely went far enough.

I raised Union Carbide Corporation as an example of what can happen in an industry if safety isn't headed, such accidents can happen in many industries and some have the potential to "salt the earth" for many many years past an event that immediately kills large numbers.

    Timing Toast

    There's an art of knowing when.
    Never try to guess.

    Toast until it smokes and then
    twenty seconds less

suggests the pragmatic answer to the question you pose is to reduce regulation until an acceptable death threshold is crossed and then regulate a tiny bit harder.

This can be difficult to do in practice.

We spend billions and billions on the industry each year. Most risks are not Chernobyl, they are Larry exceeding his defined annual dose by 30%, necessitating a plant-wide work stoppage to prepare a 300 page report on the root cause.